The Global Impact of Health IT – #HITsm Chat Topic

We’re excited to share the topic and questions for this week’s #HITsm chat happening Friday, 11/30 at Noon ET (9 AM PT). This week’s chat will be hosted by Vanessa Carter (@_FaceSA) on the topic of “The Global Impact of Health IT”.

Global health pandemics like antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance are among the most critical issues to tackle and in future will require robust, harmonious data surveillance systems along with mass co-operation between the animal, human and environmental health sectors across every country [1]. This is known as One Health [2]. WHO initiatives like GLASS (Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System) have been implemented to work towards these goals [3].

To help understand the topic of antibiotic resistance, let me start by saying that antibiotics treat bacterial infections whereas antimicrobials are a much broader term used to describe medicines that treat other types of microorganisms that cause infection. These other types of microorganisms include parasites (e.g. Malaria), fungi (e.g. Candida) and viruses (e.g. AIDS). All of these microbial infections are categorised as Communicable Diseases or Infectious Diseases. Antibiotics fall under the antimicrobial umbrella and they kill a microorganism known as bacteria. Antimicrobials, and particularly antibiotics are the cornerstone of modern medicine because they are used in all areas of disease treatments where the immune system is compromised including HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis, as well as Non-Communicable Diseases like Cancer and Diabetes where acquiring an infection is common such as during Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are also used for your everyday Strep throat, Gastrointestinal Infections (e.g. “Tummy bug”) or Urinary Tract Infections. They are also prescribed daily by dentists when we have tooth infections or for routine surgeries. Unfortunately, we are overusing antibiotics and bacteria are evolving resistance fast. This means that antibiotics are no longer working to treat common bacterial infections for many of these health conditions. What is even more frightening is that there are very few antibiotics in the pipeline. Some big pharma companies having abandoned research and development due to a lack of global data which helps to report prescribing and consumption behaviours which are contributing to resistance [4].

Antibiotic resistance is caused in various ways including through the overprescribing and misuse of antibiotics in both humans and animals. Resistant bacteria can also spread through bad hygiene practice (e.g. hand washing) or food production. The continual rise of antimicrobial resistance was recognised by the United Nations in 2016 in a high-level meeting as a serious threat to global health and human development [5] because of its severity and complexity. It has further been compared to climate change by UK economic experts like Lord Jim O’Niell [6] and invested in excessively by organisations including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust [7], particularly in Low-to-Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) where health systems are distressed and disease burdens are high.

This world has become increasingly more connected through trade and travel too, therefore tracking the spread of antibiotic resistance will probably remain impossible until we leverage the benefit of today’s digital technology to collect, process and analyse surveillance data at a national and global level. Whether or not and how health IT companies design solutions in the future taking this into consideration remains to be understood. For example, does it mean technology like EHRs should travel with us so that we improve our ability to capture holistic data, even when we’re out of our own country? What happens if we take a course of antibiotics and it never gets captured on our medical record, or worse, we pick up a disease and travel back afterwards with no data and that bacteria is a threat to our community. Shouldn’t we be considering these data gaps in all our systems? One thing is certain, without global surveillance, we couldn’t possibly begin to tackle this deadly pandemic that affects us all.

Join us for this week’s #HITsm chat where we talk about this global health challenge and how IT could potentially help with the problem.

Topics for this week’s #HITsm Chat:
T1: What do you think makes global health IT difficult to achieve? #HITsm

T2: What technologies do you think could collect global data for antibiotic resistance? (e.g. EHRs) #HITsm

T3: How do you think global health IT could benefit other medical conditions? #HITsm

T4: What are you seeing locally that you would like to see spread globally? #HITsm

T5: Why do you feel global health IT is important to achieve? #HITsm

Bonus: With global health barriers like culture, education & language, how do we overcome that with technology? #HITsm

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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About Healthcare IT Today

With over 13,000 articles, Healthcare IT Today is the leading provider of healthcare IT news, insight, and analysis. As part of the Healthcare Scene media network, our mission is to share practical innovations in, and the best uses of, technology in healthcare.